Posts Tagged ‘forgiveness’

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” – Alexander Pope

Expectation -a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.

In 1995 when I married the Executive, I knew that I was marrying into what would become a blended family – two step children and one of my own. It would be mine, his and eventually ours. My expectations were that the marriage would be stronger than both of our divorced parents, I was going to be the loving wife, work hard to keep a nice home and job, the step kids wouldn’t have to call me mom, but learn to call me friend (Ps 125:3-5), and that in the end we would have a Brady Bunch life. Not so much.

My expectations were squashed by apathy from the step kids, name calling and manipulation from my husband’s ex-wife, the repeated trips to the courthouse for revisions of visitation and child support, all compounded with snide remarks every other weekend tempered with hostility from my son’s father. We tried to stay involved and active in all of our kids’ lives, provide an open door place of respite for them to come to, and give them a model of how a Christian family functioned. It was a struggle as I dealt with my failings of not making the blended family model work.

This feeling was exacerbated by the failed expectation I had of my husband as well. If living with someone for the first time wasn’t hard enough, I expected him to be the knight in shining armor who always came to my rescue when the ex reared her ugly head or the kids shot off hurtful remarks. I expected him to fix all that was wrong. (In my mind, 2/3 of the problem was his.) Most times he was silent where I wanted rant and lash out. From him, crickets. I saw this as weakness, but since learned it’s not. The silence ended any ongoing dialogue because he didn’t contribute to the “conversation”. He literally took the fuel out of the fire, except of course when it came to my son. There were so many arguments in which I was refereeing or acting as my son’s attorney, as the Executive worked hard to be the father, life coach and disciplinarian my son desperately needed.

Growing up, my dad was a hard nut to crack. Pretty much like a hazel nut—hard on the outside, but soft on the inside if you were able to get through the dense layers. He was tough to talk to, equally tough to get to know and on more than one occasion, downright mean. But I recognize now that his past was difficult and for the most part, sad. That being said, I only have a handful of happy childhood memories of him and one of them was the ‘toe incident’.

“But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello.
Or possibly break his legs, she wasn’t sure which.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

So cute with his pretty blonde hair and blue eyes and me with the mom jeans.

When I was a single mom, I had a lot of pent-up anger. One, I had a lot of previous life choices and disappointing situations that left me questioning my purpose in this world. Two, I was frustrated with myself for getting pregnant, but now looking back realize it was a blessing. Three, I was mad at my son’s father for lying to me about not being married when in fact he was. Also, when the little guy was 18 months old, his father sued me for paternity and custody. He had decided he wanted to be a dad after all; however, didn’t have his wife’s buy-in. It was a long, drawn out, ugly mess. There were many days I struggled with the assault on my motherhood and personal choices. Thankfully, I had a friend who talked me out of my desire to do sinister things to him like running him over with my car. The anger turned into depression and it stuck to me like chewing gum on the bottom of my shoe for the next seventeen years. Even though I had accepted a life with Christ, gotten married and went onto have another child, the anger was always percolating inside, and particularly when I had to see him every other weekend and hear his verbal insults come out through the mouth of my child.